A Balanced Power
by Chris7221
Summary: When searching through ruins on another planet, SG-1 makes an incredible discovery. A Goa'uld had explored Project Arcturus and may have made it work. But they're not the only ones searching. The Lucian Alliance wants the technology as much as they do. My attempt at a pure Stargate fic- not in the future, no fleets of battleships, no powered armour.


I realize that I've never actually written a _pure_ Stargate fic. SGD is a semi-AU disclosure fic. GateWar is similar. GateWar Redux starts sane but rides off the rails. Halogate... just no. Reboot ME is barely Stargate and heavily crossover. Invasion _MCAU_. This story has no powered armour, no fleets of battleships. It's SG-1 and their meager resources against the latest canon threat- the Lucian Alliance.

This a Gen4 fic. Gen4 refers to my latest round of stories. I have too many ideas and not enough time to write them, so the idea is something like this. I'll write the first chapter of each, and then the ones I like and my readers like I will continue. Above Top Secret, Among Fighting Men, GateWar Redux and the soon to be released A Changing Reality.

* * *

**July 4, 2012  
P3X-141**

"Jackson!" Colonel Cameron Mitchell shouted. He brought up his P90 and aimed it around the edge of the chamber entrance. "Make this quick, we've got company!"

"What?" Dr. Daniel Jackson asked, looking up from the notebook in his hands and the hieroglyphs below. He was studying what appeared to be an Ancient Egyptian tomb- in actuality, it had been a kind of temple from which a Goa'uld once ruled. The chamber they were in contained a pedestal that they were using as a table that was covered with hieroglyphs, as were the walls. The throne had been removed, though they could easily make out the spot on the stone floor where it had once been.

"There's a bunch of Lucian Alliance guys headed toward our position. Pack up and let's go!" As Mitchell was talking, Teal'c moved to the other side of the entrance.

"But this could be important, very important!" Daniel protested.

"Tell me something I don't know, grab what you can and let's go!"

Daniel sighed and began dumping several objects in his backpack. The raven-haired woman beside him, ex-space pirate Vala Mal Doran, shouldered her own weapon and rested it against the central pedestal.

In front of them, Teal'c peered around the edge of the doorway, and quickly ducked back as a staff blast narrowly missed his head. "I do not believe that is possible, Colonel Mitchell."

"Well that's just great," the Colonel replied. The black-clad soldiers of the Lucian Alliance moved forward, and a barrage of energy and projectile weapons fire poured in through the doorway. He leaned out and fired, taking down one, then two of the men with bullets fired into their chests before leaning back behind the relative safety of the stone wall. "Okay, we're going to have to thin them out, then make a run for the gate."

Daniel muttered something unintelligible as he slung his backpack and raised his own weapon, firing it into the Lucian soldiers in the entrance corridor. The narrow space worked against the attackers- they could fit two, maybe three abreast. Several long bursts of machine gun fire cleared a path to the exterior.

"Come on, let's move!" Mitchell ordered, dashing out into the corridor. The rest of his team followed. Several Lucian Alliance soldiers were waiting in the woods outside, and they dove for cover behind the pillars in front of the building as weapons fire chipped away at the old stone.

Right away, he knew they were in a bad situation. There was an overgrown ruined village in front of them, with a few hostiles firing from behind rubble. Most of them were in the forest beyond, however, and he couldn't tell how many there were. It looked like a lot, a dozen or two. But bad situations were the norm for them.

"Ammo check!" he shouted as he swapped out magazines. They would need to conserve ammunition, which was easier said than done when you were being shot at.

"Three magazines!"

"Uh, three mags!"

"Two clips!"

"They're called magazines, for the last time, magazines!" Mitchell shouted at Vala. The amount of team banter they exchanged under stress would surprise many, but it kept them from snapping.

"How are we gonna get to the gate?" Daniel asked. The Stargate was on the opposite end of the remains of the village. Strangely, it was unguarded, with nobody in the immediate vicinity of the Stargate. On second consideration, he realized that it was actually very well guarded. They'd be ripped to pieces by the armed men in the woodline.

Spurred on by SG-1's reluctance to move, or perhaps a higher-ranking officer with a gun pointed at their backs, the Lucian soldiers once again resumed their advance. Dozens charged from the forests, covered by their colleagues who fired from the treeline. The Stargate was also already dialled, so they would have to wait for it to shut down before they could make their escape.

"Things just get better and better!" Mitchell remarked. "What was in that chamber that was so important, again?"

"Among the religious text, idolization, stories, that sort of thing, there was some research of a Goa'uld called-"

"Nevermind, you can give me the long version later!" Mitchell shouted back. He leaned out and fired several short bursts from his P90, taking down several of the hostiles and forcing the rest back into whatever cover they could find. "Maybe when we're rotting in a nice Lucian-"

**USS George Hammond**

"-jail cell," he finished, materializing on the command deck of Earth's latest battlecruiser. He stumbled a few times before regaining his balance. "Sam!"

The familiar face of Colonel Samantha Carter, scientist, former member of SG-1, and current commanding officer of one of Earth's few interstellar vessels, smiled back at him. "Sorry about the surprise beaming. We detected gunfire and intercepted your transmissions, I figured you wanted extraction as soon as possible."

"You figured right," he replied. "We were about to be overrun by those Lucian Alliance bastards."

"I take it you didn't just show up to say hi?" Daniel asked.

"Yes, actually, that's a good question, how did you know to come here in the first place?" Vala added.

"Major Marks, you have the conn." Carter stepped toward the hatch leading out of the compartment, motioning for SG-1 to follow. "The SGC tried to contact you several times since you left yesterday. When they couldn't get a lock, they rerouted me from a routine scout mission to see what was going on. Turns out our worst fears have been confirmed."

Mitchell replied as he strode down the busy corridor, "Yeah, well, you got us out of there so everything turned out fine."

She shook her head. "That's not what I'm talking about, not specifically."

"Oh, you have got to be kidding me," he replied as they entered the Hammond's small, but functional conference room.

Sam had already decided that this would be a small, informal meeting. She shut the hatch behind them and sat down. "As you know, the Lucian Alliance has been fractured ever since the death of Netan. It held together, more or less, under the leadership of the Seconds until last year. After the failed attack on Earth, the Alliance fractured, and became far less of a threat."

"I'm starting to see a pattern here," Daniel muttered.

"Right, letting us focus our efforts on the Wraith and preventing them from invading our galaxy-" Cameron paused for emphasis- "Again."

"Right. Recently, however, the remains of the Lucian Alliance have begun fighting each other, and the situation has devolved into an all-out civil war."

She paused to let it sink in. Vala broke the silence. "I'm sorry, but wouldn't that be a good thing for us?"

"Yeah, I'd have to agree with Vala," Cam told her. "We let them kill each other, then swoop in and clean up whatever's left."

"Unfortunately, there'll be more left than we can handle. Sooner or later, someone's going to come out on top." Sam opened a folder and removed a photograph, which she passed around. It was a grainy portrait of a grizzled looking man with short brown hair and grey eyes. "This is who our money's on. Recognize him?"

"Nope."

"Nuh-uh."

"No."

"I do not."

"His name's Kefflin-"

"Oh, yeah, I remember him," Cameron reminisced. "Or, more accurately, I remember impersonating him. That was not fun."

"Hey, it could be worse," Daniel reminded him, disgust in his voice. "I once had to be Yu's Lo'taur."

"Comparisons between the Goa'uld and Lucian Alliance aside, Kefflin seems poised to take over the Alliance. He was close to Netan when he was in power, and inherited somwhere between a quarter and a third of the Alliance's assets- soldiers, ships, equipment. Moreover, he's retained control of most of the Lucian Alliance's shipyards. His faction is building up forces and pushing back the rest of the Alliance remnants. But-"

"But what?" Daniel pressed.

She passed out another picture, this one black-and-white and fuzzy. They could just make out the face of a woman in a crowd, circled with red marker. "We think this is Aerra."

"Who?" Cam and Vala asked at the same time.

"Aerra. A relative nobody in the Alliance, and also our wildcard. We know she's leading a relatively small faction, and she's using our tactics- sort of- against Kefflin's faction. Her faction has formed loose alliances with other factions, but we're pretty sure she's just going to stab them in the back when she's done. And she's ruthless.

"How ruthless?"

"We haven't been able to confirm it, but the Free Jaffa recently lost contact with an agent on a world they used to trade with, now a shipyard world controlled by Kefflin's faction. When they sent a ship by, they found that the entire planet was covered in ash, and there was a crater the size of Texas on the southern continent. We think Aerra crashed an asteroid into the planet. The planet had a population in the millions, now there's nothing left alive."

"So we've got a crazy bitch willing to kill a couple million people to take out a few shipyards, or a guy with a big fleet and a big army."

"Basically, yes."

"Not sure which is worse," Cam concluded. "So, what are we going to do about it?"

"Nothing."

"Nothing?"

"The IOA has decided that the best course of action would be to simply wait," Sam told him, her voice tinged with disapproval. "The figured that after the leadership crisis is over, we'll be able to formulate an appropriate response. I think- get this- I think they're hoping to negotiate with the victor."

"Let's see, there's the crazy bitch that blows up planets, and the guy who already hates us for tarnishing his reputation," he replied scathingly. "Somehow I don't think we'll be able to negotiate with either of them. I know we're not building up our forces, either."

"The IOA has determined that a large-scale buildup would be detrimental to the secrecy of the program. Their words, not mine."

She paused and switched topics. "But I think you've heard enough depressing news from me. What did you find on P3X-141?"

"We found a temple, one of those usual Goa'uld buildings where the peasants bow to their false god," Cam said simply. "There was a village, but it was long gone. Jackson says there hasn't been anyone there for thousands of years."

"No, not for at least a thousand years," Daniel echoed, beginning to gain enthusiasm. "What's really interesting was that this planet once belonged to Telchak."

"Telchak," Sam muttered. "He's the Goa'uld that studied the Ancient healing device. He invented the sarcophagus."

Daniel began rummaging through his backpack, looking for something he had retrieved before they had to leave. "Yes, and according to the inscriptions inside the chamber, many other pieces of Goa'uld technology, including the zat'nik'tel, stun grenade, and cargo ship. Of course, most of that is just grandstanding, but I did find this."

He laid a stone fragment on the table. It looked like it had been hurriedly chipped off, which it had, but the illustration and Goa'uld writing was still clear. Vala leaned uncomfortably close to Daniel and picked it up between her slender fingers, scrutinizing it. "What is it?"

Daniel snatched the stone piece back and gently pushed her off. He pushed it over to where Sam was sitting. "Sam?"

She examined it, picking it up, looking closely, then putting it down. "It might just be the illustration, but this looks a lot like... Arcturus."

"Arcturus?" Vala asked. "Wasn't that something they were working on over in Atlantis?"

"It was a failed experiment," Sam explained. "The Ancients tried to devise a power source to replace zero point modules. They attempted to tap energy from our universe rather than a pocket of subspace like in a ZPM- theoretically, they would be able to extract a near-infinite amount of energy. Unfortunately, it resulted in the creation of exotic particles whose properties could not be predicted. Neither the Ancients nor the Atlantis team could solve the problem."

"Yeah, didn't McKay blow up a solar system trying to do it manually or something like that?" Cam asked.

"He insists on five-sixths, but it's not an exact science," Sam replied. "Later, we tried again, extracting energy from another universe rather than our own. That didn't work out either. Turns out that the process was harmful, even fatal to the other universe."

"So you think this Goa'uld, Telchak, managed to get it working?"

"No," Daniel replied frankly. "But he experimented with it, and I think it's worth tracking down. The Ancients may have made it work, or may have at least gotten closer before their ascension. Even if it turns out to be a dead end, we may find something equally valuable when we look."

Cameron Mitchell checked his watch. "Yeah, well, it's one in the afternoon, Colorado time. Sam, you think you can get this ship home in time to catch the fireworks?"

She smiled, but shook her head. "I don't think that's going to happen. Just before we came here, we picked up a coded message from a Jaffa agent. There's a hidden Lucian facility a few hundred light-years from here. That's all we know. I want you to be geared up and ready to go an hour from now, just in case."

Mitchell sighed. "And here we go again."


End file.
